Kindergarten News

February 20

 

Dear Families,

 

Reminders:

·        100’s Day Celebration this Thursday, February 23. Students are asked to bring in a 100 collection. See info. below.

·        Snack this week is Evie. Check out our new snack preparation area.

·        Conferences are coming up next week -March 1 and 2. Let me know if you have a day/time preference.  I am working with teachers of siblings to coordinate those for you.  There is no school for students on these days.

·        I am looking for a small work bench to go in our building area.  If you know of anyone who has a child size one that they no longer are using, please let me know. I think it would be a great addition to our room.

 

Here is what we have been up to:

We started off the week with a very SWEET Valentine’s Day celebration due to both the sweet relationships this group has with one another and the fact that we had a working chocolate fountain to fill us with chocolaty goodness.  It was quite a treat and one that I am sure will be in high demand in the years to come. Thank you Tricia!

 

Warm like our hearts, the weather has not been cooperating with our current exploration of snow and ice.  We have been creative, however, in using ice cubes, sugar cubes, and a couple days of wet snow to make many discoveries:

- Built miniature snow forts/igloos and counted the area of space used

- Observed snow crystals outside with field microscopes

- Sketched our observations

- Rolled a gigantic snow/dirt/leaf ball and measured and compared the circumference to other spheres we found

- Used string to lay out the shape (circumference) of the world record snowball (23ft).

-Counted the steps of the path of our rolled snowball- 118!

- Compared melting with dissolving

-  Began brainstorming Snowman stories

- And I can’t forget our shaving cream art experiment! You can see the results above your child’s cubby.

 

This may be our last couple of weeks playing with the cold stuff and we are going to think about the question, “How are snow crystals formed?”  Using the book The Story of Snow, we are going to act out what we find and also use our new knowledge to create a couple different visual representations.  Also, this week we are gearing up to celebrate 100’s Day.  On Thursday (2-23) we will have been in school for one hundred days and we have kept track with sticks introducing place value, writing numbers, finding numbers on the number chart and anticipated visits by Zero the Hero to help us count by 10’s.  For our celebration each child is asked to bring in a Hundred’s Collection.  This can be anything they are able to carry to school.  We have had students bring in items such as: 100 straws, buttons, pet shops, pennies, Hershey Kisses and more.  The idea is for your child to do as much of the counting as possible. In class we are looking at different ways of grouping objects so they can be counted by 1’s, 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. When they put their collection on display they will lay it out in the way they counted it.  Let me know if you have any questions.

 

This week we also had the chance to partner up with our 1^st and second grade friends for this month’s Author Study.  We are learning about author/illustrator Marc Brown who writes the Arthur books.  We saw an animated story and Ms. Kate shared the story Arthur Meets the President to get us thinking about President’s Day on Monday.  Lastly, with our time together the children chose a project and worked with a 1^st or 2^nd grader. It was great to see the sharing of ideas and the conversations that went with our topic.  There is more of Marc Brown to come!

 

Here’s to a great week!       

Stephanie

633-3324